People who use online merchants or delivery companies with online access usually have at least two possible methods to track and confirm delivery of packages or other items. According to the first method, users must remember a unique—and usually difficult to remember—tracking identifier. Such a tracking code is normally a string of letters and/or numbers that have no easily remembered meaning. According to a second alternative method, the user must go through a time-consuming authentication process in order to access the tracking identifier, or in order to directly access the tracking information. Plainly, either of these two methods has drawbacks.
If the shipment was initiated in conjunction with a purchase, then the user can authenticate to the merchant web site where the user made the purchase, but less time spent authenticating normally means less security for the customer. Following a lengthy authentication, the user would then see a merchant's or shipping carrier's display of the tracking identifier as a hypertext shortcut directly to the tracking information, or a display of the tracking information itself, or the user would see a query for even more information if the merchant has not automatically provided that information to the carrier. Thus, the existing art has not yet achieved a satisfactory alternative to memorization of long tracking identifiers.